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Shameless Actress Anne-Marie Duff Will be Unsexed in Macbeth Opposite Ethan Hawke By Josh Ferri July 17, 2013 - 2:40PM Anne-Marie Duff Anne-Marie Duff joins Ethan Hawke in Broadway's 'Macbeth.' British actress Anne-Marie Duff will join Ethan Hawke in Lincoln Center Theater's forthcoming Broadway staging of the bloody Shakespeare classic Macbeth. Duff makes her New York stage debut as Hawke’s power-hungry wife, Lady Macbeth. Directed by Jack O'Brien, the production will begin performances at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on October 24, with an official opening night set for November 21. Duff starred as Fiona Gallagher on the U.K. series Shameless alongside her real-life husband, James McAvoy. Additional screen credits include The Virgin Queen, Notes on a Scandal, The Last Station, Nowhere Boy and The History of Mr. Polly. Her extensive British stage credits include Saint Joan, A Doll’s House, King Lear, Days of Wine and Roses, War and Peace, Peter Pan, Strange Interlude and Collected Stories. She also starred on audio recordings of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Othello. Macbeth follows the title Scottish general (Hawke), who receives a prophecy from three witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne. He soon becomes a tyrannical ruler and commits several murders to protect himself. The bloodbath takes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Duff)) into realms of arrogance, madness and death.Macbeth features sets by Scott Pask, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Japhy Weideman and original music and sound design by Mark Bennett.
British actress Anne-Marie Duff will join Ethan Hawke in Lincoln Center Theater's forthcoming Broadway staging of the bloody Shakespeare classic Macbeth. Duff makes her New York stage debut as Hawke’s power-hungry wife, Lady Macbeth. Directed by Jack O'Brien, the production will begin performances at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on October 24, with an official opening night set for November 21. Duff starred as Fiona Gallagher on the U.K. series Shameless alongside her real-life husband, James McAvoy. Additional screen credits include The Virgin Queen, Notes on a Scandal, The Last Station, Nowhere Boy and The History of Mr. Polly. Her extensive British stage credits include Saint Joan, A Doll’s House, King Lear, Days of Wine and Roses, War and Peace, Peter Pan, Strange Interlude and Collected Stories. She also starred on audio recordings of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Othello. Macbeth follows the title Scottish general (Hawke), who receives a prophecy from three witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne. He soon becomes a tyrannical ruler and commits several murders to protect himself. The bloodbath takes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Duff)) into realms of arrogance, madness and death.Macbeth features sets by Scott Pask, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Japhy Weideman and original music and sound design by Mark Bennett.
I smell a Tony Award!!!
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KC87 wrote: Wow, I'm really impressed!
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Here is a video interview Anne-Marie did for 'Strange Interlude'. It isn't a new interview, the audio of this was released a couple of months ago. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/video/anne-marie-duff-in-conversation.BTW-this past Tuesday was Anne-Marie's birthday so, (belated)!
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“That’s all anyone would have spoken about,” she said, back in her dressing room, hair tugged into a messy knot, legs tucked girlishly beneath her. “So I thought: ‘I won’t be able to do this play. I’ll just have to say goodbye to it.’ ”
Then the director Jack O’Brien, who had been impressed by Ms. Duff’s starring turn in George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” called with an offer for the Lincoln Center production, which is now in previews for a Nov. 21 opening. Ms. Duff leapt at it. “It was the most unbelievable blessing really,” she said. “Within the world of classical theater, there aren’t that many extraordinary characters. There are lots of ingénues, lots of aged queens, but there aren’t that many extraordinary female characters.”
What extraordinary female characters there are, chances are Ms. Duff has played them. In addition to Joan of Arc, she has appeared as Ibsen’s Nora, Racine’s Berenice and Shakespeare’s Cordelia. Simon Godwin, who directed her this summer as Nina in Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude,” a grueling role in which her character ages 25 years, describes Ms. Duff’s specialty as “impossible parts.”
Asked to find a common thread among her varied roles, she said that she gravitates toward characters “at some tipping point in their life where things can either go terribly wrong or not — some Hurricane Sandy about to come sweeping through.” When such roles crop up, she said, directors come calling.
But were you to watch her films (like “The Magdalene Sisters” and “Nowhere Boy”) or scan stills from her stage roles, you might not realize you were staring at the same actress, despite her distinct features — her “funny old face,” as she calls it. Bedroom eyes, an assertive nose and a generous mouth crowd together, like oversize furniture squeezed into a small room. These features somehow transform for each role, lurching from gorgeous to plain and back again.
When she stripped off her novelty T-shirt (the Beatles sporting red noses) and capri pants, changing into the severe, structured, rather sexy costumes designed by Catherine Zuber, her face suddenly seemed sterner, more intimidating, more beautiful. Then she dispelled the illusion with jokes. “This is a little bit of loungewear,” she said, deadpan, as she adjusted a magnificent gown. “Just the right side of S-and-M.”
Pliability and liveliness alone don’t explain why directors want to work with her. Rather, it’s an ability to force herself go almost translucent, making the feelings of her characters seem blatant, palpable. She has what her “Macbeth” co-star, Ethan Hawke, calls “a huge trove of emotion” and seems able to open it at will. As Mr. Godwin said, “It’s the meeting of the character and Anne-Marie’s soul which makes her such an extraordinary performer.”
Ms. Duff hasn’t always found it easy to untangle her characters’ souls from her own. Years ago, Howard Davies, who directed her in Donald Margulies’s “Collected Stories” in London, spoke of her “throwing herself on parts as if bruising herself on them.”
But having recently turned 43, she has learned to protect herself, somewhat. “Obviously, I have an ability to take care of myself, or I wouldn’t be able to play all these crazy women,” she said.
Still, she acknowledged, “there are always elements of a character that will haunt you, plague you for the duration of playing them.” Regarding Lady Macbeth, Ms. Duff speculated, “Her sadness, her anxiety will probably be with me.”
She also suggested that the emotional journey of the couple in “Macbeth” influenced her decision not to play opposite Mr. McAvoy, whose movies include “Atonement” and the “X-Men” series. “He’s my husband,” she said. “I didn’t want to go through that every night with him.”
Yet Ms. Duff does seem to have drawn on her own experiences to inhabit Lady Macbeth, whom Shakespeare’s source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, describes as “very ambitious, burning with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen.”
Though Ms. Duff seems rather less ruthless, she did work from her understanding of “wanting things to work within love” and her experience of being married “to an incredibly successful man.” She always works from the inside out, she said: “I don’t find a good pair of shoes and go, ‘Oh, I’ve found her.’ ”
Ms. Duff said she never had much difficulty empathizing with a character, no matter how thorny or murderous. Of Lady Macbeth’s conduct, she reasoned: “It’s heinous behavior, it’s bizarre behavior, but it’s her behavior. So I have to embrace it.”
Mr. Hawke observed that while “a lot of people pose or shade a character to make them likable, Anne-Marie has a quality where she’s able to just give herself over to it fully.”
Even though Ms. Duff does indeed give herself fully to her roles, she has learned to restrain herself in the rehearsal room. Asked about her reputed daring, Mr. O’Brien replied: “She’s elegantly fearless and brave. I think there is an almost bashful apology for the fact that she’s so emotionally accessible. She doesn’t wish to show off in a vulgar way.”
Ms. Duff does have unexpected streaks of modesty. Asked if she’d like to model the various underpinnings Ms. Zuber had selected, she politely declined. “But we’ll have a knickers party,” she told Ms. Zuber sweetly. “That’ll be fun.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/theater/playing-the-crazy-women.html?hpw&rref=theater&_r=0
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Olivier Award nominee Anne-Marie Duff is making her Broadway debut in Lincoln Center Theater's Macbeth, directed by Jack O'Brien and starring Ethan Hawke in the title role. Duff, who has played many famous women on the stage and screen in England, chats with Playbill.com about taking on yet another iconic role — this time in America.
English-born actress Anne-Marie Duff is no stranger to playing iconic women. The two-time Olivier Award nominee has portrayed some of the most notable dramatic roles on stage and screen: Queen Elizabeth in the 2005 BBC television miniseries "The Virgin Queen," the title character in Marianne Elliott's production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan and Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Duff, who also starred in the television program "Shameless" and participated in "What's it going to take?," a campaign promoting awareness of domestic abuse in the United Kingdom, describes herself as "very, very lucky" to make her Broadway debut in Macbeth. She recently chatted with Playbill.com about the relationship between Macbeth and his wife and why she thinks Lady Macbeth is a misunderstood character.You've taken on so many classic roles in London — Nora, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth… How do you approach these roles that are so entrenched in cultural history?
Anne-Marie Duff: It's funny. It's easier being here because you don't have the weight of production after production... It's kind of liberating in that sense. I suppose all you can hope to do is flesh out a character, swell them with humanity, and maybe it will come true. That's all I aim for, really.
And, how do you flesh out Lady Macbeth? She's such a complex woman.
AMD: I guess the nice thing in this production is that we are working from a point where they are both desperately in love with each other. And, if that love is there, if you buy that, if you believe her, then every dark decision, every insane visit into a parallel universe that happens, has a residue there. So you are forced to be engaged. You're forced to care about them as individuals and perhaps empathize and then question that empathy.
It's interesting to think about how their choices to murder people affect their marriage and their romantic relationship.
AMD: The thing is, she's only interested in the first man. After that, he's a totally different individual. They're not Bonnie and Clyde — she drifts away from him in terms of that response. After the first objective is achieved, she thinks, "We've landed. We need go no further," and he becomes insatiable. And that's the beginning of the end of their relationship.How do you think the role of Lady Macbeth speaks to women in our society?
AMD: I think she's curious, isn't she? Because that's the quest for the kingdom — for me to play her as a woman that exists, not some excuse for his bad behavior. I think it's very easy to go down that path. You don't want that sort of reactionary opinion. So that's all I can hope to do. If her want, her need, is as palpable and as believable as his, her desire for something more than what they have, I think I'll help make it make sense.
Many of the themes in Macbeth — femininity, gender roles, lust for power — are so timeless.
AMD: It's an extraordinarily complicated time for women; it's the same at home as it is here now. And I look at teenager girls, and I think, "This is very hard for you." There are very annoying priorities. It seems to have stripped away everything that has happened over the past 30 years. It's curious. I think that's probably why, as well, I have such a huge objective to make not just a misogynistic version of evil. Everybody says, "Oh, Lady Macbeth — how are you going to play her?" And I say, "I'm going to tell the story that Shakespeare's written." And most people have an opinion. She's one of those people that even people who haven't seen the play go, "Oh, I think I know who she is. She's the evil woman who whispers in his ear."
There have been so many productions of Macbeth recently. What is it about this play that makes it so popular right now?
AMD: It's always been popular, and that was part of the superstition. If you were doing a production and it was failing miserably, then you take it off and you bring in Macbeth, because it would always sell out. If you heard "Macbeth" being mentioned around the theatre, and you were in a stinker, then you were going to come off. I think quite a lot of productions try to focus on this sort of nihilistic world, so you get people in fatigues and a campy version of the play in a world with no resources left, which I think is a way that people can rationalize all the magic and all of those things. I think, in that way, they feel like it's very topical, it's very timely.
Dec 19 13 3:48 AM
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